With Broidy, of course, the
weird connections spread in all directions. When former Trump adviser Steve
Bannon was arrested this summer, he was enjoying himself aboard Guo’s 151-ft.
yacht, Lady May. Before that, Broidy reportedly impregnated a Playboy
Bunny. Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, helped arrange a $1.6 million
payoff to keep the Bunny from spilling her story. And, of course, the Bunny
went on to have an abortion. Broidy was also known for his “fine work” in
tandem with George Nader. In 2018 the pair pushed President Trump to meet with
the leader of the United Arab Emirates, who, along with the leaders of Saudi
Arabia, hoped to convince the U.S. to take a strong stance against rival Qatar.Nader, who served as an adviser
to the president during his first run for office, has also had his name added
to the Wall of Dishonor. In his case, he plead guilty recently to a charge of
child sex-trafficking.
So, in just one story about
Team Trump, we have:
Bannon: charged with embezzlement.
Broidy: now indicted.
Cohen: pled guilty to nine felonies, two of which he
committed at the urging of “Individual 1,” an unindicted co-conspirator.
Gates: pled guilty to multiple felonies; became a
cooperating witness in the Mueller investigation.
Low: indicted on multiple charges; fugitive from
justice.
Nader: serving ten years in prison.
Razak: found guilty of fraud and sentenced to pay a
fine of $50 million and spend twelve years
behind bars.
– and –
President Donald
J. Trump: a.k.a. “Individual 1” in the
Cohen indictment.
 |
Nader (left), Buffoon (right). |
POSTSCRIPT: No day is complete without the President of the United States making
some absurd statement. Yesterday, during an evening town hall meeting on NBC,
Trump cited a study by CDC that he claimed warned of
the dangers of mask-wearing in a time of COVID-19. In fact, “just the other
day, they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks,
catch it.”
Terrifying,
if true.
But…not
true.
The dummkopf
president made the same claim during a morning appearance on Fox News, and
again during a packed afternoon rally in Greenville, N.C. No one at either Fox or
attending the rally saw the illogic in Trump’s claim; but on NBC, moderator
Savannah Guthrie fact-checked the president as soon as the last crazy syllable spilled
from his lips.
“They didn’t say that,” she responded. “I know that study.”
“Well, that’s what I heard. And that’s what I saw,” Trump
replied defiantly.
That meant today, CDC was forced to clarify the matter again –
and basically explain that the boss had no clue. Even Trump’s former head of
the FDA, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, felt the need to speak up.
On CNBC, he explained:
Masks are not a panacea, but
they’re going to afford you a level of protection. In an environment where the
alternative is having a raging epidemic that’s going to force some kind of
economic dislocation, I’d rather try to get everyone in masks and I’d rather
try to get them in high-quality masks because we know it’s going to slow down
the transmission. It’s going to have an impact.
So, once again, where the pandemic is concerned, the
president does more harm in a typical day than good.
And that wasn’t the only lowlight of the evening, courtesy of
the President of the United States. Guthrie also challenged him on the accuracy of a retweet he issued on Wednesday. In the
original tweet, from a QAnon account, a novel conspiracy theory had been advanced.
Supposedly, Joe Biden was behind a plot to take out the group of Navy SEALs who
killed Osama bin Laden – despite the fact that every Navy SEAL involved in the bin Laden raid is still alive.
Trump didn’t bother to defend the accuracy of the claim. He only
suggested to Guthrie that because he read it on the internet it might be true! He
called the original tweet “an opinion of somebody and that was a retweet. I’ll
put it out there. People can decide for themselves. I don’t take a position.”
Yeah, I’m just the president, putting out nonsense, and if my
supporters fall for it, what are you gonna’ do?
___
10/17/20: With only seventeen days remaining till the
election, you have wonder what kind of people believe Trump deserves a second
term.
Yesterday, at a rally in
Michigan, the president stirred the hate again, pouring out vitriol on the
governor of that state.
____________________
“It
may be legal for the president to make those requests, but it is not legal for
the attorney general to act on them.”
Former Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein
____________________
According to Mr. Trump, Gov.
Gretchen Whitmer’s “crimes” included keeping schools closed during the pandemic,
limiting seating in restaurants, and mandating masks to stop the spread of disease.
But had Trump forgotten he had already stirred up groups like the Wolverine
Watchmen and the Proud Boys (and even neo-Nazis) with this very same brand of hate?
A plot hatched by the Watchmen, to kidnap and kill Whitmer, had been foiled by the F.B.I. just days
before. In one text message, an alleged conspirator suggested an easy way to
dispose of the governor. “Have one person go to her house, knock on the door and
when she answers it just cap her.”
Now these same groups are planning
to show up armed and ready at polling places on November 3. It’s telling, of
course, that neo-Nazi groups would also be rallying to the Trumpian cause.
So, there was Trump, as
warped a human being as ever graced the Oval Office, stirring fans to chant,
“Lock her up! Lock her up!” in reference to the governor. It was the sound
of fascism birthing in America. Trump told supporters his White House predecessor,
his opponent in 2016, and his foe on November 3, should all be lodged behind
bars.
If you don’t realize how
dangerous this man is, I’m not sure you can call yourself a good American. You
certainly can’t call yourself an informed one. Recently, Trump attacked his own pick to head the F.B.I. Then he attacked his own pick to head
the Department of Justice. Then he attacked former Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein. Trump was furious to learn that a DOJ report on the roots of the
Russia investigation would not be ready before the election. He had been counting
on all of the men and women who had anything to do with looking into contacts
between his campaign and Russians in 2016, to end up being indicted.
As for what Trump wanted from
an investigation, frustration with his party makes it clear. “The Republicans,
they don’t play the tough game,” Trump assured Rush
Limbaugh
during a call to his show. “If this were the other side you would have had
25 people in jail for the rest of their lives with what they found.”
Trump
was obviously projecting. In accusing Democrats of a desire to lock up 25
people for “the rest of their lives,” he was tipping his orange hand. It was what
he’d do if he had the power. Other Republicans, he groaned, didn’t want to
“upset the apple cart.” They “don’t play it the same way [as the Democrats], it’s
very disappointing.”
Yes,
what fun it would be if Trump could simply lock up 25 of his opponents and do
it for life.
Trump appeared next on Fox
News to try out his proto-fascist line. “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for
crimes, the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’re
going to get little satisfaction,” he grumbled. “This was the greatest
political crime in the history of our country, and that includes Obama, and it
includes Biden. These are people that spied on my campaign.”
*
ANOTHER
INVESTIGATION, into supposedly “unusual” requests by Obama officials in
2016-2017, to “unmask” a Trump adviser who was meeting with Russians, also came
up empty this week.
That
adviser, Gen. Michael T. Flynn, was indeed meeting with Russians. And
we’ve repeatedly listed all the Trump advisers who met with Russians during his
first run for office. That list again: Michael Cohen, Flynn, Rick Gates, Jared Kushner,
Paul Manafort, George Nader, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Felix Sater, Roger
Stone, and Donald Trump Jr.
“They’re
guilty as hell.”
You
might even say that Trump summed up his theory of
how the rule of law works this week. If you’re not able to see the danger, you
probably need to read more about people like Robert Mugabe and Vladimir Putin. “Personally,
I think it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. It’s a disgrace,” Trump said in one interview.
He didn’t care what investigators found. “Personally,” he wanted his political
opponents to pay. “They’re guilty as hell,” he told a reporter.
No
trial required.
This
simple blogger was not the only observer to sniff out danger in Trump’s words. “Many
of us have criticized President Trump for these reckless comments,” said
Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar at George Washington University. And before
Trump fans start imagining Turley is a cog in the “Deep State” machine, they
might think back. He was the only legal scholar called to testify during hearings
in the U.S. House of Representatives, who argued that what Trump had suggested in
his call to the President of Ukraine was not grounds for impeachment. Now, Turley
was definitely worried. The president’s demands for retribution, “undermine
not just the Justice Department but his administration.”
Former
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was even more blunt. “The Department of
Justice will ignore the president’s remarks about indicting political opponents
just as the department has always done in the past,” he said.
“It
may be legal for the president to make those requests, but it is not legal
for the attorney general to act on them.”
___
10/18/20: President Trump announced that Sunday would
mark the start of “Character Counts Week.”
Really.
This is not a parody.
If you’re an elementary school
teacher, you can find ideas online to celebrate the “Six Pillars of Character.”
You can do readings
related to character too. For example: Is There Really a Human Race? You
can look up what the pillars are, and discuss one each day in class.
As a middle school or high
school teacher, perhaps you could ask students to write an essay, “How Does
President Trump Exemplify the Six Pillars of Character?” I think that might be
fun.
*
“Inspiring and incentivizing and inciting…domestic
terrorism.”
One person who might argue
that the president has zero pillars of character, would be Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
of Michigan. Having heard Trump stir a crowd on Saturday to lock her up, she was
rightly upset. “It’s incredibly disturbing,” she said on Meet the Press
Sunday, “that the president of the United States, ten days after a plot to
kidnap, put me on trial and execute me – ten days after that was uncovered – the president is at it again and inspiring and
incentivizing and inciting this kind of domestic terrorism.”
If you follow the news
closely, you might understand why Whitmer was spooked. In a separate but
similar incident, Meredith Dowty, a retired firefighter in Wichita, Kansas,
heard the president’s siren song.
Dowty is alleged to have hatched a plan to fight “masks and tyranny” by kidnapping
Mayor Brandon Whipple.
Having seen some of the
threatening messages Dowty allegedly sent, the mayor summed up his foe’s plan: “He said he was
going to kidnap me and slash my throat and he needed my address because I
needed to see the hangman – me and everyone who…” Whipple trailed off.
“Something
about tyranny.”
POSTSCRIPT: Mr. Trump had a busy weekend campaigning and
burnishing his fascist cred. On Friday, he told a Florida crowd that Rep. Ilhan
Omar, another nemesis, had entered the
country illegally at age 12, as a refugee. In an effort to stir the hate, he
attacked her Muslim faith, saying – with zero proof – that she “married her brother or something
[emphasis added].”
At
a rally in Wisconsin he brought her up again. He beamed, like Mussolini, when
the crowd began chanting, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”
Call
me old-fashioned, I guess. Before we lock anyone up, I would prefer we observe all
the protections guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, regarding the accused. (See: Amendments IV, VI, VII, VIII and XIV.)
___
10/19/20: Fifteen days till
the election and we still suck as a nation in how we’re dealing with the virus.
Nearly every state in the union is seeing rising
caseloads. South Dakota, where Governor Kristi Noem has ripped a page from Trump’s
knucklehead playbook, has been hit hard. This week she insisted the only reason
her state was reporting more cases was that testing capacity had tripled.
It had nothing to do with the fact that in the last seven days, 36.4 percent of the tests South Dakota administered had come back
positive.
For purposes of comparison, Ohio’s positivity rate is 4%.
Two weeks ago, Noem’s state hit a record daily high for cases of COVID-19. (Noem is one governor
who has eschewed mask mandates.) Last week, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota,
Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan all hit single-day highs. So did West
Virginia and Kansas.
Yet, there was President Trump, stumping in
Wisconsin and Michigan this weekend, insisting the nation had “turned the
corner” on the coronavirus. This will be “good news” to the thousand people in
Wisconsin and the thousand in Michigan currently hospitalized with the virus.
 |
Wisconsin. |
 |
| Michigan. |
You can go digging for positive news regarding COVID-19
if you desire. You won’t find much. Florida has had just under 48,000
hospitalizations. That includes 2,005 sufferers currently under care. Montana’s trend line for hospitalizations is alarming. Based on
state records, 1 in 13 people diagnosed with COVID-19 have required
hospital stays, including 331 currently. The death rate for Montanans is 1.1%
of 22,821 cases, with another 9,000 still in recovery. Kansas is typical of the current
situation across the country: rising cases, rising hospitalizations, rising
deaths. North Dakota, same.
 |
Montana hospitalizations. |
Ohio had seen a steady decline in
hospitalizations during the summer, with a low at one point of 563 persons
receiving care. Now, the upswing has begun, with 1,097 hospitalized on October 18.
Generally, the picture is grim. Nebraska has seen hospitalizations nearly double since July. New
cases per day have quadrupled in New Jersey
since August. An average of 20 people are dying in Pennsylvania every day and more than 800 are
lying in hospital beds, hoping not to join them.
If we are “turning the corner” as the president
insists, it isn’t clear what we’re going to see around the corner, save for more
deaths, more hospitalizations, and more economic distress. Texas made good progress slowing the
spread, from nearly 11,000 cases daily in late August, to only 3,200 by
mid-September. Now cases creep upward again, to 4,200 per day. Wyoming was one
of the last states to be hit hard, with only six cases on June 4, now rising to
more than 200 daily.
We can offer only brief glimpses of sunshine piercing
the clouds. Daily cases numbers are falling in Georgia, Hawaii, California, and
Washington D.C. They are holding steady or rising slightly in a handful of
states. Vermont has only two people hospitalized as of
October 18.
 |
Even Team Trump is trying to show that his supporters are masking up.
In the wild, most aren't. |
*
BUT WAIT! Did we say there were only brief
glimpses of sunshine? In terms of disease, yes. In terms of curing ourselves of
Donald Trump, polls indicate doctors have high hopes for ballot recovery.
The website FiveThirtyEight has Joe Biden
with a commanding lead:
BLOGGER’S NOTE (11/9/20): This prediction
will prove far too rosy.
___
10/20/20: It’s Day #3 of
Character Counts Week. Sadly, the oaf in the Oval Office is having trouble handling
the pressure of a reelection campaign. In a call with top staff, Trump refuses
to take responsibility (one of the Six Pillars of Character) for the hash he
has made of handling the coronavirus.
____________________
“If more Americans paid attention
to his advice, we’d have fewer cases of COVID-19, & it would be safer to go
back to school & back to work & out to eat.”
Sen. Lamar Alexander, defending Dr. Anthony Fauci
____________________
Denying even the math, the president continues
to insist that the nation is turning the corner in the fight against the virus,
and he should get at least one more term in office, if not two or ten.
Since last we checked, the CDC has recorded the following new case numbers:
10/16:
70,078
10/17: 53,157
10/18:
47,035
10/19: 60,061
Total cases: 8,188,585.
Death toll: 219,499.
Tens of thousands more Americans have been,
or are, currently hospitalized after being infected. Hospital bills, if
nothing else, have been wrecking strained family finances across the land.
 |
Dr. Birx (left) and Dr. Fauci (right) have been masking up for months. |
*
THE OVERALL PICTURE looks like hell. That means Trump
has to find someone else to blame.
(“Leadership” is another one of the Six Pillars
of Character, which Trump is also going to knock over today.)
Trump’s latest fall guy turns out to be Dr.
Fauci. According to the president it’s Dr. Fauci’s fault that idiotic claims
have been spilling from presidential lips for months. Such as: the virus is no worse than flu. The virus is going away soon. It will disappear like magic, or could be cured if we inject disinfectant.
If that doesn’t work, crushed flower petals will.
Now, in a rambling phone conversation with top
campaign people, he criticizes the doctor for providing bad advice. “People are
tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots,” the president grumbles, “these, these
people that have gotten it wrong.”
(“Respect” is one of the Six Pillars – and down it goes.)
Trump tells supporters that Fauci’s a Democrat,
which in Trumpistan means he can’t be trusted at all.
(He’s not a Democrat, by the way.)
“Every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb,” the
president whines. “But there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him. But Fauci’s a
disaster.”
As for Trump – hey, hundreds of dead
every day, no big deal – he’s ready to move
on. “People are tired of COVID,” he insists. His campaign should ignore the
virus and focus on the imaginary danger presented by Antifa. “I have the
biggest rallies I’ve ever had,” Trump brags. “And we have COVID. People are
saying: whatever. Just leave us alone. They are tired of it.”
As for the nation being tired, Biden’s campaign quickly
responds: “Mr. President, you’re right
about one thing: The American people are tired. They’re tired of your lies
about this virus.”
The pettiness (“pettiness” is not one of the Six Pillars of Character) of
the president was also on display in a batch of knucklehead tweets. In one he
faulted Dr. Fauci for appearing more often on TV than “the late, great Bob
Hope.” Then he mocked him for wearing a mask to throw out the first pitch at
the Washington Nationals’ Opening Day game. That game took place in July!
Now – on the eve of the World Series – the
fool in the White House seemed to believe it was relevant that Dr. Fauci, 79, delivered what was “perhaps the worst first
pitch in the history of Baseball!”
Yeah. That was Trump’s focus.
*
FEW REPUBLICANS spoke up, because
in Trumpistan they’ve been neutered and know how to grovel. Sen. Lamar
Alexander of Tennessee, chair of the Senate Health Committee, did at least come
to Dr. Fauci’s defense. Alexander, who retires at the end of his current term, offered
an implicit denunciation of the president. Fauci, he said, is “one of our
country’s most distinguished public servants. If more Americans paid attention
to his advice,” he continued, “we’d have fewer cases of COVID-19, & it
would be safer to go back to school & back to work & out to eat.”
(The Trump quotes, above, come from several
sources: the Associated Press, Axios, The New York Times, Sen. Alexander’s Twitter feed and the blogger’s transcription of Trump’s
words from tape.)
POSTSCRIPT: Trump often cites
Antifa as his latest Boogie Man, used to scare the totally uninformed.
According to detailed analysis, members of
Antifa have been linked to one death in the U.S. in the last quarter
century. In that incident the deceased was deemed the assailant.
Unless that case is adjudicated further, we can report
that far-right extremists have a 329-0 lead in murders committed during that period.
___
10/21/20: Day #4 of
Character Counts Week! Paul Krause, former president of Blue Bell Creameries, is
definitely not going to be held up as an example to children by America’s schoolteachers.
____________________
Bloated
capitalism has a bad day.
____________________
Rather, Krause proves a liberal maxim.
Government regulations are often necessary to curb the excesses of bloated capitalism.
Just weeks after his company agreed to pay a $17.5 million fine for price
fixing – that is, cheating customers – Krause was indicted on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy.
Has “Law & Order” Trump ever talked about
attacking white collar crime? Most of his family – but not Barron or Tiffany,
and probably not the First Lady – and half his cabinet would go to jail.
*
WE KNOW President Trump likes to lead cheers at almost every
rally, where loyal fans chant about locking up Americans who have never been tried
and convicted, let alone indicted.
Has he ever laid out his feelings toward plea-deal accepting
felons? If you missed it, Team Trump added another name to the “Wall of Dishonor.”
But first, a little nuance and context. If you are a big fan of this president – and you
love to chant, “Lock her up!” Or “Lock him up!” Or “Lock them all up!” you
probably haven’t ever considered this point. Since it’s Character Counts Week,
and our topic today is bloated capitalism, don’t forget that not so long ago
the Chinese offered to bail out Jared Kushner and his family, who were carrying a massive
debt on a property at 666 Fifth Avenue, in New York City.
If
it had been Obama who owned that building, QAnon supporters would have said,
“Of course: ‘666,’ the sign of the beast.”
Anyway, bad publicity ensued – the president’s
son-in-law and family getting bailed out by commies. The deal was torpedoed.
Jared is always trying to bring peace to the
Middle East. So, one day, he met with some folks from Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates. They really wanted the U.S. to support a blockade of
rival Qatar. Jared said he’d talk to his father-in-law and see what he could do.
Meanwhile, Elliott Broidy, pal of the president, snagged a lucrative contract (worth at least $200 million) from the
Emiratis.
The Qataris heard the news and got antsy. Would
they be odd-country out, in terms of deals with Americans? Suddenly, a Qatari
sovereign fund bought up most of the debt on 666 and bailed out the Kushner clan.
When the free press broke that story, Qatari
fund managers claimed all they saw was a really good investment opportunity.
What???? You don’t mean 666 Fifth Avenue is owned by the Kushner family!
Boy, were they surprised!
Later, George Nader, an ally of President Trump
and Mr. Broidy, gets busted for child sex trafficking. He pleads guilty
and gets sentenced to ten years in the slammer. (Definitely not a good example during
Character Counts Week!) Nader, who helped Broidy snag that $200 million deal
with the Emiratis, agrees to cooperate with investigators. Broidy gets investigated next. The feds get
the goods. Today he pleads guilty to one act of conspiracy to violate the
Foreign Agents Registration Act. Until he was caught, Broidy had been piling up
the big bucks, selling access to the White House to sleazeball characters.
Take for example, Najib Razak, former Prime Minister of Malaysia. Razak looted
his country, got caught, and now finds himself sitting in jail.
In exchange for leniency, Broidy has also agreed to
cooperate with investigators and forfeit $6.6 million.
Prosecutors are clear: Broidy had been a walking, talking,
money-grubbing threat to U.S. security.
“Elliott Broidy sought to
lobby the highest levels of the U.S. government [emphasis added on this
blog, unless otherwise noted] to drop one of the largest fraud and money
laundering prosecutions ever brought and to deport a critic of the Chinese
Communist Party, all the while concealing the foreign interests whose bidding
he was doing,” Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers said in a statement.
“Such conduct poses a serious
threat to our national security and undermines the integrity of our democracy,”
added acting assistant attorney general Brian C. Rabbitt. (See: 10/16/20 for
more detail on Broidy.)
*
IN OTHER NEWS, Trump fans are bummed to learn that the “Deep State” has infiltrated the Trump campaign.
Members of the Satanic, pedophile, cannibal,
liberal cabal convinced organizers of a Trump rally in North Carolina to ban
anyone from wearing QAnon gear or waving patriotic, flag-themed “Q” signs. If followers
of “Q,” who make up a sizeable lump of the Trump base, wanted to flash their
secret sign at Trump rallies, they’d have to do it quick, and not get caught on
TV.
Well, QAnon fans, take heart! The “Deep State” can’t stop Marjorie Taylor Greene, GOP candidate for Congress.
Greene is a big believer in “Q” and his/her
idiot theories and an equally big believer in owning all the guns you can
afford. Because we all know, “Only a good guy with a gun can stop a cannibalistic
liberal from gnawing off our legs.”
Behind the scenes, Trump lawyers have been
helping her advance her campaign, which makes one wonder. Did Team Trump ban
QAnon gear, because most Americans think the QAnon line is nuts, and they didn’t
want to look bad with less than two weeks to go until the election?
Or was Team Trump tricking the cannibals? Did Team Trump have a secret plan to defeat
them once and for all?
___
10/22/20: No doubt you have
been celebrating Character Counts Week by focusing daily on one of the “Six
Pillars of Character.”
It’s Day #5, and President Trump is whining
about how unfairly he was treated by Leslie Stahl during an interview for 60
Minutes.
____________________
No
president has ever whined more.
____________________
This is not to be confused with his whining
about how mean he says Kristen Welker, who will moderate the second
presidential debate in the evening, is going to be. This was supposed to
be the third debate, but the previous debate was canceled after Trump whined
about the plan to include a mute button.
Whining is definitely not one of the “Six
Pillars.”
*
IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE and there might have been no more debates
at all. James Dale Reed, a Maryland genius, had hatched a plan to tip the
scales of the election in Trump’s favor.
When neighbors placed a Biden/Harris sign in their yard, Mr. Reed
got to thinking. Why not sneak over to their house and leave a threatening
note, telling them, “I plan to kidnap and kill both Vice President Biden and
Sen. Kamala Harris!” Be sure to include profanity and racist language.
Sadly, his John Wilkes Booth plan unraveled, when
it turned out his neighbors had a Ring doorbell, which snapped his photo.
Reed is now in custody. And let’s hope he stays there long enough
to miss a chance to cast a ballot.
A rash of right-wing nuts have made the news recently,
with plots to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan, to kidnap the governor
of Virginia, and kill the mayor of Wichita, Kansas. Now authorities in North
Carolina have another genius in custody. After Alexander Hillel Treisman posted threats to kill
Mr. Biden on social media, he was hauled off to jail. A search of a van he owned,
back in May, turned up a cannister of the explosive Tannerite, an AR-15, and other tools
one might collect if one had mayhem in mind. As a bonus, Treisman is also being
held on child pornography charges.
At the rate police are vacuuming up right-wing
nuts, it could tip the balance of the coming election. Frank J. Caporusso, a New
Yorker, may have watched too much Fox News, because it struck him that Gen.
Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor, was the victim of
judicial abuse.
On Tuesday, Mr. Caporusso made his own appearance
in court and pleaded not guilty to two felony counts.
According to court documents, the defendant decided
that if justice were to prevail, he would have to nudge it along with gunfire.
He found the phone number for the judge’s chambers in the Flynn case, and left
a voice mail:
We are professionals. We are
trained military people. We will be on rooftops. You will not be safe. A hot
piece of lead will cut through your skull. You bastard. You will be killed, and
I don’t give a fuck who you are. Back out of this bullshit before it’s too
late, or we’ll start cutting down your staff. This is not a threat. This is a
promise.
Apparently, this is how we “Keep America Great.”
*
WITH THESE PLOTS FOILED, the presidential debate
went off as scheduled Thursday evening without blood being spilled.
This blogger watched every minute, only muting
Trump once near the end. Almost every pundit agreed when it was over that it was
better than the first debate, in the sense that, unlike the first, the president
was not throwing feces at Biden like an enraged chimp. We did learn a bit about
both candidates. We learned that Mr. Trump is delusional and thinks the
coronavirus is going away. We all wish that were true, but it’s demonstrably not.
On Thursday, CDC reported there were 74,380 new cases and 1,009 additional deaths.
In the week just ended the country racked
up nearly 429,000 new cases and 5,530 Americans died.
Yet, during the debate, the president said that
99.9% of young people recovered. You sensed he wanted to bust out and claim this
virus is no big deal, and we should open everything back up and he should win
the November election with 538 electoral votes. He went on to say that 99% of
all those infected survive. Just look at him! But this blogger was dubious
because this blogger grasps math. If we have 222,447 dead, as CDC reports, and
99% of those who are infected recover, we would have had to have 22,244,700
cases by now for that percentage to be correct.
We’ve had only 8.4 million, meaning, based on
raw numbers, that 1 in every 38 patients infected dies.
Plus, the average American doesn’t want to go to
the hospital like the president and pile up unwanted medical bills.
Trump also said, during the debate, that he
hoped to kill the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” and replace it with a
better plan. When pressed, he did admit he still didn’t technically have a
plan he could share.
His plan, apparently, is all in his head, and
involves a high percentage of pixie dust and free band aids.
Trump babbled on about how he had done a great
job of handling the pandemic. He even claimed that he had been “congratulated
by heads of many states” on the wonderful job he was doing. At that moment, we
were still leading all nations in number of cases. We were also leading in total
numbers of deaths, and made the Top Ten in most deaths per million in population.
I was hoping Biden would smack his forehead, demand
to know which world leaders had told Trump he was doing great work, and announce
to viewers that 40,000 Americans with COVID-19 were in hospitals that night.
That kind of math doesn’t bother Mr. Trump. He attacked
Biden and his old boss, President Obama, for their “terrible” record on H1N1, a
far less dangerous virus, which killed 12,469 Americans in 2009-2010.
Since only 1 in every 4,786 persons infected
with H1N1 died, it was hard to see the president’s point.
“Crystal
clear water and air.”
As a good liberal, I thought Mr. Biden’s
performance was adequate. It was not great. He was vague with several answers,
and I felt should have said something when the president kept talking – on almost
every answer – well past his allotted time. Ms. Welker could often be heard
saying, “Ten seconds more, Mr. President,” as Trump blathered on. Trump would sometimes
continue for an extra minute.
If I had been Biden, I would have started
counting off seconds silently, and holding up fingers for viewers to see, till Trump
passed ten, then folding them again, as he passed twenty. When it was his turn,
I wish he would have said, “Apparently, the president doesn’t grasp the concept
of time, any more than he understands the science of the virus or climate
change.”
The two candidates were asked about their plans
to address that issue. And I am not making this up. Trump started talking about
how he was for “crystal clear water and air.” “Mr. President,” I wanted Biden
to respond, “you are a pudding head! Crystal clear water has nothing to do with
climate change. You might as well be talking about pogo stick jumping, for all
the good your answer serves.”
Trump also tried to claim his administration had
done a fabulous job of protecting the environment. Again, I knew from extensive
reading that a coalition of 170 environmental groups had banded together and
called Trump a “malignancy” and an active threat to the health of the planet.
(See: 9/14/20.)
Ms. Welker did ask about a story that more than
500 children, separated from their parents in 2017, after their families tried
to cross the U.S. border, had still not been returned to loved ones. The federal
government didn’t seem to have any plan on how to get them returned.
Again, Mr. Trump tried to blame Obama and Biden,
which made zero sense, because the separation policy involved was hatched by
his administration. Neither Biden nor Obama was in office in the summer
of 2017. You would have expected a man of any compassion to say, “We will be
working overtime to find the parents and return these children; and my
administration made a mistake.” This
was Trump. At one point, he retorted, “These kids are so well taken care of,” as
if being separated from parents for more than three years was no big deal.
As far as who won the debate, I felt Biden
played it much too safe and Trump was his usual blustering self.
As far as changing voter’s minds, it was probably
a wash.
POSTSCRIPT: Due to spreading forest fires, Rocky
Mountain National Park is closed to visitors.
Residents of Estes Park, a town of 6,000 were also told to evacuate. The fire
is now eating up 6,000 acres of forest per hour, or a little more than nine
square miles of Colorado real estate.
You could mention this to President Trump as additional evidence of
the damage we’re all going to see as a result of climate change. But you might
as well talk to your Golden Retriever for all the good it would do.
___
10/23/20: Day #6 of
Character Counts Week and we have two more negative examples for teachers to
share!
____________________
More
capitalist crooks. A second stimulus plan in the works?
____________________
If you are a huge fan of President Trump, and
you think Antifa and Hunter Biden are the biggest threat to our country right
now, you probably haven’t been following these two stories.
First, Goldman Sachs, the company that brought
you the 2008 financial meltdown, has agreed to pay fines and penalties totaling $5 billion for their role in
a massive fraud, perpetrated by government officials in Malaysia. Executives
with Goldman thought it would be good business to bribe officials in return for
their investing money in a fund Goldman was supposedly creating to help the
Malaysian people. This turned out to be a mistake when the bribed officials
turned out not to have any scruples and looted the fund to the tune of $6.5
billion.
This is not to be confused with the $5 billion fine Goldman paid for touting “high quality”
securities they were selling in 2005-2007. Those securities turned out to be
worthless when the housing bubble burst. (See: 10/16/20.)
Second, if you missed it, Purdue Pharma, makers
of oxycontin – guaranteed to end any pain you might be feeling – often forever
– has agreed in federal court to pay a fine of $8.3 billion.
It’s the price you pay when your company claimed
oxycontin was perfectly safe, even for babies, and contributed mightily to an
epidemic of drug overdose deaths that has killed 450,000 Americans in twenty
years.
The Sackler family, which owns Purdue, will now
find it harder to hide billions of dollars from state officials suing their ass.
*
THURSDAY MORNING, it seemed like a second
stimulus deal was in the works. The president’s economic advisor, Larry Kudlow,
announced that an agreement was shaping up. This package would, according to President
Trump, rescue all the people who weren’t part of the greatest economy this
nation has ever seen, or will ever see, if the republic lasts for 10,000 years.
If Trump gets a second term it won’t even last
four.
“A
relatively sunny, optimistic morning.”
Ever the optimist (Kudlow predicted in 2007 that
the housing bubble Goldman Sachs helped burst was not going to burst), and
gazing at the proverbial glass, Kudlow decided it was not half full. It was brimming
with fresh trillions Congress would spend, the spending of which Trump
would love, love, love to see.
After all, once you run up a deficit of $3.1
trillion in Fiscal Year 2020, why not shoot for $4 trillion in FY 2021!
In an appearance on CNBC, Larry said it seemed
to him like “a relatively sunny, optimistic morning in terms of the negotiations.
Things are moving in a favorable direction. I can’t promise anything, but
things are getting better, looking better for this.”
Friday morning, the situation was unchanged.
Democrats had already passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus package and delivered it
to the Senate, where Mitch McConnell has the votes to pass it if he wants.
President Trump looked at the glass, and told everyone
he was in favor of an even bigger glass, filled with more deficit spending.
“Let
me just explain,” Trump said during an interview on Fox & Friends. “I want
to do it even bigger than the Democrats. Not every Republican agrees,
but they will [emphasis added]. I want to do it even bigger, because this
is money going to people who did not deserve what happened to them.”
“I
would rather go bigger than that number, but we’ll see,” he added in his usual nonsensical
fashion. (None of the three hosts seemed to notice the incongruity, which is part
of their job.) Pelosi, he said, “doesn’t want to do anything until after the
election, because she thinks it helps her. I actually think it helps us,
because everyone knows she’s the one who’s breaking up the deal.”
Time for a reality check.
Dear Fox News viewers:
If you are watching Fox &
Friends regularly, you probably can’t see past Ainsley Earhardt’s shapely
legs.
Speaker Pelosi has already sent
over a large package. The president says he wants to go larger, still!
How is it possible the fool in the
Oval Office can’t work out a deal?
Your friend in patriotism,
The Blogger
(See
below.)
*
SENATE MAJORITY LEADER Mitch McConnell looks at
the same glass, grabs it, and pours the contents down the kitchen sink. He warns the White House not to push for a big bailout until after
the election.
If a vote were held, a whole bunch of Republican
senators would vote against it. Voters, millions of whom are hurting, would get
mad.
So: Save the senators!
Blame Pelosi and move on.
In fact, “maybe never” would be the right time
to pass a big stimulus bill, if McConnell has his way. Mitch had gazed upon the
Democrats’ $2.2 trillion package, and labeled it “outlandish.”
Wednesday,
we know Trump himself saw the glass, spit in the glass, and handed it back to
the American people, via Twitter. “Just
don’t see any way Nancy Pelosi and Cryin’ Chuck Schumer will be willing to do
what is right for our great American workers, or our wonderful USA itself, on
Stimulus,” he groaned. “Their primary focus is BAILING OUT poorly run (and high
crime) Democrat cities and states.”
Apparently, when he was talking
about “our wonderful USA,” he had in mind states and cities were most people
voted for him.
Then Kudlow said it was a
bright, shiny morning.
And then, today, a whole lot of
nothing from either side. The president known for making deals, fails to get a
deal done.
The sun sets on Washington,
D.C., but Trump is not there to see it go down. He’s off to Mar-a-Lago for the
first time in months.
Since taking office he has spent
406 days, more than a year’s worth of his first
term in office, at properties he owns.
 |
Who doesn't want a big stimulus package?
This guy. |
___
10/24/20: Character Counts
Week comes to an end with President Trump picking up a “coveted” endorsement,
and still whining about how unfair everyone has been to him, regarding his
handling of COVID. As mentioned at the start of the week, whining is not one of
the Six Pillars of Character.
As for that endorsement, President Jair
Bolsonaro of Brazil has announced that he is all in on the Trumpster, for four
more years in the White House.
____________________
“With the help of a surgeon he might yet recover and prove himself
an ass.”
William
Shakespeare
____________________
The Bolsonaro shoutout makes perfect sense
because the Brazilian leader has long been a virus denier. Like Trump he was
careless. Like Trump, he got infected. He too recovered and proved the validity
of Shakespeare’s jest.
Also, like Trump, his refusal to accept science
cost his people dearly. Almost 157,000 Brazilians were not so fortune as their
idiot leader and succumbed, placing Brazil second for most deaths from
COVID-19.
The countries with the highest death rates, adjusted for population, are:
Peru (1,028 deaths per million)
Belgium (918)
Spain (743)
Brazil (737)
Bolivia (734)
Chile (725)
Ecuador (708)
United States (694)
Mexico (683)
United Kingdom (658).
Heretofore, we had been including tiny Andorra
(893) and San Marino (1,237) in our list, but that now seems pointless.
On this Friday in fall, the U.S. hits a record high for cases in
one day. President Trump may insist we’re “turning the corner,” but if we are,
we just turned the corner on a dark night and ran smack dab into a mugger, who
cracked us on the head with a club and stole our wallet.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, where some of the
best scientists in the world work, the U.S. piled up
82,929 new cases in one day.
That means, we’re back where we were in July, at the previous
high point of spread, with nothing to show for all our pain and sacrifice.
*
MEANWHILE, the president is off on the campaign trail, and,
where COVID-19 is concerned, as clueless as ever. This may have something to do
with the fact that Dr. Fauci mentioned Friday that Mr. Trump has not met with the White House
Coronavirus Task Force in months.
This at least explains why Trump is telling fans
at rallies in Ohio and elsewhere, and tweeting away, saying we’ve got this
under control and there’s not the least reason to worry.
For example, in a tweet this morning, he laid
out his “plan” to tame the virus. That is, blame someone else:
The Fake News is talking about
CASES, CASES, CASES. This includes many low risk people. Media is doing
everything possible to create fear prior to November 3rd. The Cases
are up because TESTING is way up, by far the most, and best, in the world.
Mortality rate is DOWN 85% plus!
So, there you have it. Another 5,474
Americans died from the disease during Character Counts Week. The President
of the United States ends the week weakly, blaming the free press for the mess
he made.
___
10/25/20: The coronavirus
continues to kick ass around the globe – except, mysteriously, in the U.S. – where
Donald Trump swears that we’ve turned the corner on Gloom Street. Now we’re
headed down Sunshine Avenue.
____________________
Was
being president making Trump measurably stupider?
____________________
In reality, a place Trump rarely visits, Friday
was the worst day since the pandemic began for new cases in the U.S.
Yet, there he was, at one of his rallies, predicting
that on November 4, news coverage of the disease would go away if Biden won.
The media was making up scary stories because they wanted to harm his campaign.
If a plane carrying 500 people crashed Sunday, the media wouldn’t cover it, the
president wailed. They’d only cover 500 deaths from COVID-19.
At that point you had to wonder. Was being
president making Trump measurably stupider?
First, let’s see if all the U.S. airliners
falling out of the sky were covered this year. Okay. There haven’t been any.
There was one death, when a man found his way
onto a runway at an airport in Austin, Texas, and got hit by a Southwest Airlines jet that was landing. But that accident
was covered.
R.I.P. wandering gentleman.
*
NOW, IF 11 U.S. PLANES, each carrying 500 men,
women, and children, went down this week? Definitely, that would be covered.
That would make headlines in every newspaper and lead on every cable news program
in the land. Even Fox News would cover the story. Sean Hannity would do all five
shows for the week, blaming planes falling from the sky on liberals.
You don’t need x-ray vision to see through
Trump’s attacks on the media. The problem for an alarming percentage of Trump
fans is that they are profoundly uninformed and so won’t see anything the
president doesn’t want them to see. A glance at the CDC website shows that in the past seven days, the U.S. has
averaged 782 deaths from the virus daily.
If you are someone who believes Trump’s claim, and
you think the media is the problem, I will talk slowly. Multiply.
You know, the “x” button on the calculator.
Multiply “782” by the number of days in the
week. Seven. In case you forgot. The number you see pop up instantly: “5,474.” That
is the number of people who have died in this country from COVID-19 in the past
week.
The media hasn’t killed a single one; but
Trump’s poor leadership has greatly increased the toll.
 |
Trump Airlines: We bring you 11 crashes per week. |
*
IF YOU ARE READING REPORTS from Christopher
Murray, director of the University of Washington’s
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and I’m sure you hate to miss even
one, you know that he is predicting a bad winter ahead for catching the virus.
“We think the key point here is that there’s a huge winter surge coming,”
he warned in a press briefing this week. Having blown our chance to tamp down
the spread, a big wave isn’t fully preventable, but “expanding mask use is one
of the easy wins for the United States.”
Murray and other scientists who worked on a recent report believe universal
mask use could save 130,000 lives.
Or: 260 planeloads of 500 passengers and crew each.
*
IN OTHER NEWS, Vice President Pence’s chief of
staff, Marc Short, a man who has scoffed at those who wore masks, has been infected. Two others who have been in close contact with
Mr. Pence recently, have also contracted the disease, including a second member
of his staff.
Mr. Pence has tested negative (so far) and will
continue to travel the country spreading good Christian cheer, and maybe some
virus.
___
10/26/20: The president declared
victory in the fight to contain the coronavirus this weekend.
With eight days until the election, he and his
minions will now focus on:
A) Infecting each
other (See: Mike Pence & Co., 10/25/20).
B) Bragging about how Trump
created the greatest economy in U.S. history, for which he gets every bit of
credit.
C) Whining because
that economy is lagging, which is the entire fault of Joe Biden and Antifa.
D) Insisting we’ve
turned the corner on the coronavirus, we just don’t realize it, because the
media keeps reporting on all the new cases and an alarming wave of
hospitalizations.
E) And deaths!
Meanwhile, we learned that on Saturday, we
passed the same old corner, and the record for most new cases of coronavirus
recorded in one day, in this country, was broken. That “old” record was set this
past Friday.
The new record:
83,851.
Several of those new cases were people close to Vice
President Pence. Over the weekend, Pence’s chief of staff, a top political
advisor, and three other members of his inner circle fell ill.
____________________
“We’re
not going to control the pandemic.”
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows
____________________
Sunday morning, White House Chief of Staff Mark
Meadows appeared on Jake Tapper’s show on CNN. Tapper wanted to know – since
VP Pence had been in close proximity to several people who were infected – why he
wasn’t self-quarantining as CDC guidelines say he should.
Meadows defended the vice president’s decision
to go off campaigning, saying, “actually, he’s working.”
For some reason, Meadows dropped Pence in his
very next sentence. He switched to bucking up Mr. Trump. “We saw a Middle East
peace agreement with Sudan in the Oval Office, that the president engaged in,
and for anyone to suggest that the president has been campaigning and not
getting things done, all you have to do is look at the facts.”
I myself was “looking at the facts” as I watched
tape of the show. I wondered why Meadows decided to talk about the president
campaigning, and not Pence, since Pence was the one who had just been exposed.
Meadows went on to say that CDC guidelines say
“essential workers” can keep going to work.
So: Pence was at work. While off campaigning?
Tapper held a hand across the bottom part of his
face, and responded, yes, they can go to work, “if they wear a mask.”
After
all, I thought to myself…you could do both.
Meadows grew irate, blaming Tapper for putting
information about the spread of the virus on his CNN website! Tapper’s website
warned that the virus was spreading even through small family gatherings.
“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows
fumed. “We are going to control the fact…”
I found myself watching Meadows’ lips move, but
thinking that controlling “the fact” wasn’t going to stop the spread.
“…that we give vaccines, therapeutics, and other
mitigation,” he continued.
“Why aren’t we going to control the pandemic?
Tapper interjected.
“Because it is a contagious virus, just like the
flu.” Meadows said animatedly. They went back and forth, with Meadows repeating
“the vaccine, etc.,” and Tapper asking why the administration wasn’t doing more
to contain it.
(After
all, I thought to myself…you could do both.)
Meadows tried to shift blame to Tapper. And Vice
President Biden! “To suggest that we’re going to quarantine all of America,
lock down our economy…Joe Biden’s saying that, lock everybody down, we’re going
to have, we’re going to have a dark winter, we’re going to have a dark winter…”
Tapper noted that that’s what health
officials were saying.
Meadows retorted that even some CNN reporters who
have worn masks “religiously” had contracted COVID-19.
In other words, Meadows couldn’t explain why
Pence was out on the trail when health guidelines would have him quarantine.
Nor did Meadows care to address the poor example Trump continued to set, with
his masks-are-not-needed, social-distancing-is-for-sissies campaign rallies.
In Trumpistan, if a reporter wore a mask and got
sick, that proved to followers of the Orange God, that masks did not work.
___
10/27/20: Team Trump keeps reminding
us that we have rounded the corner and the pandemic is over. Today, the White House office of
Science and Technology released a list of President Trump’s accomplishments
since taking office. First on the list: “Ending the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
Meanwhile, CDC would seem to believe the
pandemic has not ended. The seven-day average shows the U.S. racking
up 70,289 new cases, nearly a half million more in the last week.
Each day, 797 Americans on average, have died.
Those 5,579 dead this week will be happy (in
heaven) to hear the coronavirus has been conquered.
*
HOPEFULLY, we’re one week away from “turning the
corner on Trump.” Reports are already circulating. If he wins he’s going to fire F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray. As Axios
explains, “A win, no matter
the margin, will embolden Trump to ax anyone he sees as constraining him from
enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies.”
Trump’s complaints regarding Wray are all political and help us understand
his total disregard for the rule of law. First, the president is angry because
the F.B.I. hasn’t launched an investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign
business connections in time to help him win the election. Second, he’s fuming because
Wray testified in front of Congress and said the F.B.I. had not seen any evidence
of widespread voter fraud, not even involving “dreaded” mail-in ballots. Third,
Trump wanted Wray to fire anyone who had anything to do with the Russia
investigation, including the janitor who took out the trash. And we already
know, Trump has said he believes Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe and
Hunter Biden should be in jail.
Trials optional.
*
HOW MUCH of a threat to democracy and the rule of law is this
president, if unleashed for four more years?
We know GOP senators won’t stand in his path. Yesterday, they caved
and voted to allow him to pack the U.S. Supreme Court. With eight days remaining
until the election, they voted 52-48, with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine the lone
Republican siding with Democrats and voting “no,” to advance Judge Amy Coney “Court
Packing Dummy” Barrett to the highest court in the land.
This compares with almost all of those same 52 cowards
insisting, in 2016, that with ten months left in President Obama’s second
term, they dared not shirk their duty to protect the integrity of the Supreme
Court. They could not in good conscience vote on his nominee to fill an empty
seat.
Why?
Because they had to let the “people speak.” Let freedom ring!
Only now, they’ve removed the clapper from the bell. Expect Justice
Barrett to get right down to business. She can vote to overturn Roe v. Wade
and vote to blast the Affordable Care Act to flinders.
Let’s say you are pregnant because you were raped. With Justice Barrett
casting the deciding vote, lawmakers in Alabama will soon be able to require you to have the baby. According to conservatives,
this is as the Founding Fathers wanted it – even though the word “abortion” does not appear in the U.S.
Constitution.
Ironically, Barrett is an “originalist,” who will rule only on
what the Constitution says, and what the Founding Fathers said in 1787.
Being an “originalist” can be perplexing, because even the men
who wrote the Constitution did not agree on what it meant. Sometimes they blazed
away at each other in duels in order to determine whose interpretations were
best.
We should also mention that none of the Founders had ever heard
of insulin.
Or female judges.
So, can Congress pass a healthcare bill that tells insurance
companies they can’t discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions?
For example, a 24-year-old with type-1 diabetes, who needs insulin to
survive? Or a 61-year-old who has already suffered a stroke? It’s not the
insurance company’s fault if you have a three-year-old, and your child develops
leukemia! You should pay all the bills, yourself. Didn’t James Madison or Caleb
Strong say that?
(That’s right,
I said it: Caleb Strong, Founding Father, bitches.)
Barrett will now bring serious conservative chops to Supreme
Court deliberations. For instance, she might support the kind of thinking that
held that “freedom of speech” means billionaires can donate millions of dollars
to candidates and political causes and get tax codes passed that save them
hundreds of millions. I think the conservative majority in Citizens United
v. Federal Elections Committee ruled that, “Money talks.” Therefore, political
spending is free speech.
As Ben Franklin once said, “A penny saved is a penny earned, and
if multiplied enough times will allow you to buy a U.S. senator.”
It might make perfect sense that a man of strict religious
principles – a baker in Colorado – should not have to bake a wedding
cake for a gay couple. So ruled the Supreme Court in the Masterpiece
Cakeshop case. That decision rested on the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.
Now, with another originalist on the high court, we can get back
to ruling the way the Founding Fathers always wanted.
The new conservative majority may overturn Obergefell v.
Hodges and stop the practice of gays and lesbians marrying, which is how Justice
Clarence Thomas ruled, as part of the then-conservative minority in that 5-4 decision.
Perhaps Thomas, another originalist, Barrett, and the other conservative justices
could revisit Loving v. Virginia. There was a time when most states had
laws banning interracial marriage. Then along came a bunch of liberal, “activist
justices,” who ruled, 9-0, that a right to privacy existed, and states could
not determine who you chose to marry. This is ironic, in Justice Thomas’s case,
because he’s married to a white woman. It took a landmark Supreme Court
decision in 1967 to overrule laws that would have banned his marriage.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if
we were guided only by the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, we’d still be ruling
that African Americans were property, and Dred Scott, a slave who came before the court in 1857, had
“no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Ah, 1857! It was a time when America was
great. In those days, if two slaves married their bond had no legal standing.
A master could end their union by selling one or both, to different owners. If he
kept the couple and they had children, the master could sell them instead. He
could whip the husband if he protested and force himself upon the wife for sex.
Property rights were sacred, just as the
Founding Fathers (10 of our first 12 presidents being slave owners) intended.
So, welcome Judge Barrett. We “look
forward” to the day when rape victims have babies. And if those babies are born
with serious health problems, mom can’t get insurance. And dad is a rapist.
Because you will have cast the deciding vote to kill the only
law that ever protected people with pre-existing conditions.
Just as Caleb Strong always wanted.
___
10/28/20: Six days until the election and
more than 66 million Americans have voted early, in person, or by mailing ballots.
Polls indicate that President Trump has a narrow path to
victory; but he may triumph again and have a chance to ruin the country.
____________________
“Joe Biden may not be the president we want, but in 2020 he is the
president we desperately need.”
New
Hampshire Union Leader, endorsing a Democrat for the first time in a hundred
years.
____________________
*
THE APTLY NAMED James Blight, of Haines City, Florida, decides
he might widen the president’s path, at least in his hometown. First
step: Drink all afternoon. Second: Steal a front-end loader with a backhoe arm.
Third: Drive through town digging up people’s Biden/Harris signs
and vandalizing their properties.
Bright’s foray into politics ends almost as suddenly as it
began. As NBC News explained earlier this week:
James Blight, 26, was arrested and charged Saturday with grand
theft auto and trespassing [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted], with additional
charges possible, Mike Ferguson, public information officer for the Haines City
Police, said in an email Monday.
“Blight told police that he had been drinking whiskey all day
and did not remember most of the day,” Ferguson wrote. “He said that he
couldn’t help but hit the Joe Biden signs and acknowledged to taking down a
fence in the process. Blight said he did not know how to operate the equipment.”
Ferguson said that investigators learned that “Blight took out a
private chain-link fence and several political signs” and a “city-owned speed
limit sign.”
“It’s absurd that a grown man could think he had the right to
destroy someone else’s property based on a difference in political opinion. The
fact that he was driving this heavy equipment, that he did not know how to
operate, down busy roads could have been disastrous. We’re thankful that no one
was hurt in this matter,” Haines City police Chief Jim Elensky said.
One witness described the slow-motion front-end loader chase
that ensued, with cars backed up behind the slow-moving getaway vehicle.
“I jumped
into my truck and called 911 and followed him along, and the whole time he’s
riding down the road, he’s yelling at people, cussing them out,” Marion
continued, alleging that the suspect told one person at an intersection, “I’m
going to run you over.”
*
BLIGHT’S EFFORTS to help the president were negated when, for the
first time in more than a century, the conservative newspaper, the New
Hampshire Union Leader, endorsed a Democrat for president.
Union Leader editors explained:
We were hopeful with Trump’s win
that he might change, that the weight and responsibility of the Oval Office
might mold a more respectful and presidential man. We have watched with the
rest of the world as the mantle of the presidency has done very little to
change Trump while the country and world have changed significantly.
President Trump is not always
100 percent wrong, but he is 100 percent wrong for America.
They cite, for example, the “7 TRILLION in new debt,” the
president and his GOP enablers have rolled up in just four years.
They go on:
Donald Trump did not create the
social-media-driven political landscape we now live in, but he has weaponized
it. He is a consummate linguistic takedown artist, ripping apart all comers to
the delight of his fanbase but at the expense of the nation. America faces many
challenges and needs a president to build this country up. This appears to be outside
of Mr. Trump’s skill set.
Building this country up sits
squarely within the skill set of Joseph Biden. We have found Mr. Biden to be a
caring, compassionate and professional public servant. He has repeatedly
expressed his desire to be a president for all of America, and we take him at
his word. Joe Biden may not be the president we want, but in 2020 he is the
president we desperately need. He will be a president to bring people together
and right the ship of state.
*
“A threat to the rule of law in our country.”
TWENTY FORMER U.S. ATTORNEYS, all Republicans, sign a letter
Tuesday, warning, in a way, that this blogger has
been right from day one of this blog. President Trump, they say, is “a threat
to the rule of law in our country.”
“The President has clearly
conveyed that he expects his Justice Department appointees and prosecutors to
serve his personal and political interests,” said the former prosecutors in an
open letter. They accused Trump of taking “action against those who have stood
up for the interests of justice.”
“He has politicized the
Justice Department, dictating its priorities along political lines and breaking
down the barrier that prior administrations had maintained between political
and prosecutorial decision-making,”
Greg Brower, a former U.S. attorney for Nevada, served
during the first years of the Trump administration as the F.B.I.’s assistant
director for congressional affairs. He explained why he added his signature to
the letter. “I had a up-close view of how the President and the White House
dealt with the Justice Department in recent years,” he told a reporter. “It’s
clear that President Trump views the Justice Department and the FBI as his
own personal law firm and investigative agency,” Brower added. “He made
that clear privately – and publicly.”
POSTSCRIPT: A federal judge has admonished the Department of Justice for a
plan to defend Trump, in a defamation case filed against him in state courts by
a woman named E. Jean Carroll.
Ms. Carroll has accused the president of raping her in a department
store dressing room, in the mid-90s, long before he was elected.
Attorney General William Barr perused the case, and decided DOJ
should protect Trump as a “federal employee,” even though, when the alleged
crime occurred, he was a douchebag businessman in New York City.
In a 61-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan
rejected DOJ’s request for permission to defend the alleged rapist. “The
president of the United States is not an ‘employee of the government’ within
the meaning of the relevant statutes,” Kaplan ruled. “Even if he were such an ‘employee,’
President Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements concerning Ms. Carroll would
not have been within the scope of his employment.”
Trump’s comments, Kaplan explained, concerned an alleged
sexual assault that predated his time in office, and the allegations against
him had “no relationship to the official business of the United States.”
In other words, the president could hire a lawyer his own
damn self and not try to stick taxpayers with the cost of his defense.
___
10/29/20: Here, in Cincinnati, it’s
raining steadily, as we catch the remnants of a tropical storm spawned by
Hurricane Zeta.
That Category 2 hurricane, which churned ashore Wednesday and
battered Louisiana, was the third of the year to strike our unlucky sister
state. Two million people across the South are without power. Homes have lost roofs and walls.
Businesses have been flooded. Cars have been smashed by falling trees.
____________________
The hold of the
Trump cult is strong.
____________________
Climate scientists have said it again: We knew this
was coming. We warned that hurricanes would be more common, that they would be more
intense. That they would dump more rain as they passed.
President Trump has managed to convince the faithful in MAGA red
that climate change is a fiction.
*
MEANWHILE, the coronavirus kicks back up across the country and
Team Trump fights to save the president’s reelection. According to the
president we have “turned the corner” on COVID-19! People who deal in stocks, and
economic realities, are so excited to hear the news of a corner turned that
they send the Dow Jones down 943 points on Wednesday. This follows a “rally”
Tuesday when the Dow dropped 650 points, as
brokers sensed more Trump disease-fighting
magic was coming.
*
I’M SORRY to say this. But blogging about Trump, and fighting
with conservative friends and relatives on Facebook, I have come to understand that
the MAGA faithful will believe anything, no matter how absurd. It’s like
those poor souls who still support Keith Raniere, founder of NXIVM, the abusive
sex cult. Raniere was sentenced to spend the next 120 years in prison earlier
this week, whereas most Americans can only hope that Donald J. Trump will be
sentenced to live out his life as a “loser,” after he gets voted out of office on
November 3.
But the hold of any cult is strong. Many Trump fans will keep believing,
as their Orange God says, that new-fangled lightbulbs contain
“dangerous gasses.” That masks don’t really work against the virus. Yet, injecting
disinfectant does. They will keep believing Obama was born in Kenya because
their prophet said he was. Then he admitted that Obama wasn’t, but they never
noticed. They will believe NASA scientists lie about climate change, and health
experts lie about how deadly the coronavirus is, but that their prophet tells
the truth. Against all logic, in defiance of all math, they will argue that all
patriotic Americans should cast ballots for Trump, because the president has
been a mastermind when it comes to guiding the economy.
Let’s look at actual math and try not to cry.
Start by studying the “jobs boom” that predated the pandemic. What
follows are facts that are easily verified, assuming you’re not a lazy slob, intellectually,
like the president himself.
First, we know, because we can add on fingers and toes, that Trump
added fewer jobs in his first 37 months in office than Obama did in his
last 37.
Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Reports: Jobs Added or Lost
Jobs added under Obama in his last 37 months:
2013: 69,000 (December)
2014: 3,004,000
2015: 2,720,000
2016: 2,345,000
Total: 8,138,000, divided
by 37 = 219,946
jobs per month.
(For simplicity, we always skip January 2017, because that
month was split between Obama and Trump.)
Jobs
added under Trump in his first 37 months:
2017: 1,924,000
(February-December)
2018: 2,314,000
2019: 2,133,000
2020: 469,000 (January-February)
Total: 6,840,000, divided
by 37 = 184,685 jobs per month.
That’s the math.
*
WE ALSO KNOW that the Orange God likes to brag about – and members of his cult like to believe – that the stock market has soared to
stratospheric heights since he was elected.
If we look at actual numbers, we see that at this point in Obama’s first term, after 45
months in office, the Dow Jones was up:
63.7 percent.
After 45 months of Trump “magic,” we find the Dow is up:
33.5 percent.
Again, for those of us not ensnared in the MAGA cult, those
numbers are what we call math.
The hold of the cult is powerful. The cult leader mesmerizes
fans. He tells them the markets will crash if Joe Biden and the Democrats take
charge. The people in MAGA robes throw up their hands and chant. “Oh, Orange God,
Lock him up! Lock them all up!!”
They chant. They don’t check. They don’t know that during
Obama’s two terms in office the Dow rose 148.3%. They don’t remember that under
Bill Clinton the stock market rose 228.9%.
If you told them that under the last Republican president,
George W. Bush, markets fell 26.5% – and then Obama inherited a mess – their eyes would glaze over. They would wave
their totems in your face. “Q,” they would mumble, “Q,” protect us from this
liberal math, this satanic curse.
*
PERHAPS, WITH PROFESSIONAL HELP, you could deprogram members
of your family who belong to the Trump Cult. A skilled deprogrammer might point
out that when Obama was in office, Candidate Trump, Republicans in Congress,
and perhaps the member of the cult, him- or herself, all shouted that they despised
federal red ink. They could be reminded that Trump promised, if elected, that he
and the high GOP priests would lower taxes (on billionaires and themselves),
but so manage the economy as to make the federal deficit disappear in eight
years.
Poof!
The member of the cult, as part of his or her therapy, could
be made to count by billions, and trillions, adding, “Trump
added this,” after each billion, in hopes a breakthrough might result.
The deprogrammer could start with Fiscal Year 2018, since the
Fiscal Year numbers for 2017 were mostly cooked into the books by the time the
Orange God took charge. So, the cultist would chant, “One billion, Trump added
this,” up to “779 billion, Trump added this,” for FY 2018.
The chanting would continue on up through, “Three trillion,
one hundred million, Trump added this,” for FY 2020.
FY 2018: $779 billion
FY 2019: $984 billion
FY 2020: $3.1
trillion
FY
2021: $2.1 trillion (estimate)
The experts might also ask cult members to express their
feelings, to respond to certain prompts.
For example, “How did you feel, when in Mr. Obama’s final days
in office, the Orange God and his priest, Sean Hannity, insisted that
unemployment numbers were ‘rigged,’ and that there was no way unemployment was really
4.7 percent in January 2017?”
“How did you feel when Trump insisted that 93 million Americans were out of work?”
“And how did you feel when Hannity added a couple of million to
the gospel, and said that Obama’s ‘legacy’ would be 95 million Americans eliminated from the workforce
during his eight years in office?”
The deprogrammer could ask: “What did you think when a very
confused Orange God claimed, variously, that the unemployment rate when Obama
stepped down was 18% or 35% or 28% or even 42%, not 4.7%?”
Did they feel confused?
Or did they believe any numbers that spilled from Trump’s
lips?
Let them express their feelings – their rage – their love of
country – their fears – even their latent racism, if any.
Let them confront the truth.
Next, the deprogrammer should make them put pencil to paper and
figure out the math.
If, in March 2017, when the first jobs report under President
Trump came out, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed 188,000 jobs had
been added in February, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.6%, what
happened to those 93 or 95 million Americans, out of work under Obama?
Where did they go?
Poof?
Don’t let the member of the cult dodge the facts. Insist they keep
doing the math with pencil and paper. If they resist, make them start counting
down on their fingers. If 188,000 jobs were added in February 2017, and the Bureau
said unemployment stood at 4.6%, how was that possible?
Did the Prophet and his priests lie?
Make the poor MAGA man or woman start at 93,000,000, and count
down, “One job added, 92,999,999 Americans out of work remain.” Make them keep repeating
the proper numbers until they reach, “188,000 jobs added, 92,812,000 Americans
out of work still remaining.”
If they lose track, make them start again.
If the cult member resists, the deprogrammer should try tactile experiments. The member of the
cult could be asked to take off his or her MAGA hat and fill it with grains of
rice. He or she should count them off, until they get to 6,840,000, the number
of jobs added to the U.S. economy in President Trump’s first 37 months.
Then, if they still think all 93 million unemployed Americans
are back at work, it might be necessary to force them to eat 86 million plus grains
of dried rice.
Frankly, these poor folks are deserving of sympathy. They are in
the grip of forces they do not comprehend and know not how to combat.
The pandemic hits. The Prophet tells them that coronavirus cases
are “headed for zero” soon.
And they believe.
Yet, the virus does not go away. It explodes. The economy has to
shut down to stop the spread. And in two months (March-April) 22,160,000 jobs
are temporarily lost. COVID-19 doesn’t go away.
It spreads.
The Orange God tells them not to worry. The economy will come back
like a “rocket ship.” May, June, July, August, and September – the Prophet’s “magic”
returns!!! A total of 11,417,000 jobs are “added” to the U.S. economy. On the
Fox News Business channel priests of the cult insist that Donald Trump is the
greatest jobs creator in American history. If he is not chosen to
lead the people in a second term, then socialists will block us from reaching
the Promised Land.
Antifa devil worshippers will run amok in our streets!
Again, the members of the cult must be required to check their Prophet’s
and priests’ math. These poor souls are going to be difficult to reach. The deprogrammer
may have to resort to bringing in the cult member’s first grade teacher, to go
over simple math. Worksheets with pictures might be beneficial. The cult member
should have to practice cursive and write his or her name at the top of the
paper. The first grade teacher can ask questions like, “Which number is larger,
the 22,160,000 jobs lost early this year, or the 11,417,000 jobs regained
since?”
The member of the MAGA cult should be forced to add the 6,840,000
jobs created in Trump’s first 37 months in office, and all the jobs added between
May and September, and then subtract the jobs blown to bits in March and April.
This is a harder question, so the answer can be multiple choice.
They might be asked, “Which statement is correct?”
A)
These
jobs numbers show that people who believe in math secretly hate America.
B)
The
Orange God has created 110 million jobs.
C)
The
Orange God has created twice as many jobs as his predecessor and in only four
years.
D)
Trump
is nearly 4,000,000 jobs in the hole and will end his first term in office having
created no jobs at all.
If the cultist gets the answer wrong, it may become necessary to
resort to shock therapy, to help.
Make Math Great Again!
 |
Which president is going to finish with zero jobs created? |
___
10/30/20: President Trump has been
campaigning hard in recent days, which means plenty of lying, insults, and
threats.
_______________________
A desperate president comes up with someone new to blame for the
coronavirus crisis.
_______________________
He’s sounding more than a little desperate. On Friday, he came
up with someone new to blame for the coronavirus crisis.
America’s doctors!
 |
Trump tries to throw doctors under the bus. |
As he “explained” to a crowd attending a Michigan rally there was
a reason Germany had a much lower death toll, adjusted for population, than the
United States of America.
You know in Germany, if you have
a bad heart and you’re ready to die or if you have cancer and you’re going to
be dying soon, and you catch COVID, that happens we mark it down to COVID. You
know our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID, you know that,
right? I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say
is, “I’m sorry, but you know, everybody dies of COVID.” But in Germany and
other places, if you have a heart attack or you have cancer, you’re terminally
ill, you catch COVID, they say you died of cancer, you died of a heart attack.
With us, when in doubt, choose COVID. It’s true, no it’s true.
Now, they’ll say [he points at
reporters in the back of the crowd], “Oh it’s terrible what he said,” but it’s
true. It’s like $2,000 more. So you get more money. This could only happen to
us.”
It is true.
That is, it is true that this could only happen to us. Only a fabulist
like Trump could stand before a crowd and insult frontline medical workers.
And that, without offering any proof.
*
REPULSED by the president’s baseless attacks, the American
Medical Association released the following statement:
Throughout
this pandemic, physicians, nurses, and frontline health care workers have
risked their health, their safety and their lives to treat their patients and
defeat a deadly virus. They did it because duty called and because of the
sacred oath they took. The suggestion that doctors – in the midst of a public health crisis – are overcounting COVID-19 patients or lying to line their pockets
is a malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided charge. COVID-19 cases are
at record highs today. Rather than attacking us and lobbing baseless charges at
physicians, our leaders should be following the science and urging adherence to
the public health steps we know work – wearing
a mask, washing hands and practicing physical distancing.
As far as testing and the pandemic go, the Centers for Disease
Control discounts the idea that we are turning the corner on COVID-19. The
scientists and experts tally a growing cost. New cases:
10/27: 72,183.
10/28: 82,599
10/29: 90,155 (highest one day total recorded)
Latest seven-day average:
76,785 (highest since the pandemic began).
Death toll:
10/27: 901.
10/28: 1,060.
10/29: 1,055
Seven-day average deaths:
807.
Death rate, last seven days: 1
in every 95 patients.
Total deaths, so far: 228,100.
POSTSCRIPT: Friday, the president also
clogged his Twitter feed with half-truths and frantic lying. Lowlights included:
“Watch the Great Red Wave!”
(Biden has an
average lead in the national polls of 7.8
points.)
“More Testing equals more Cases. We
have best testing. Deaths WAY DOWN. Hospitals have great additional
capacity!”
(Hospitalization rates are increasing.)
“The Election should END
on November 3rd.”
(So, if he’s losing, he’s not going to go to court?)
“Joe Biden has vowed to
abolish the entire U.S. Energy Industry.”
(Does this include the use of fire?)
“President Obama used to
say that ‘if you wanted to see something really screwed up, give it to Joe
Biden to do.’”
(When I try to find
the source of this quote, I end up at Australia
Online News, and when I checked the “story” it
had one “like.” You figure that was Trump.)
FUN FACT- DIMWIT SON: “Like dimwit father, like dimwit son,” as the
saying goes. Donald Trump Jr. shows up on Laura Ingraham’s show and claims that
deaths
from the coronavirus have dropped
to “almost nothing.” So we should all be sure to vote for Dimwit Dad.
(Dimwit Laura immediately agrees.)
BLOGGER’S NOTE: On this same day, CDC
reports that 980 Americans die
from COVID-19. On 10/31 another 896 succumb. On 11/1 691 additional deaths are
recorded, followed by 845 on 11/2 and 1,161 on Election Day, 11/3.
After a slight drop, on 11/9, the U.S. hits 1,079
deaths again, and on no other day, during Don Jr.’s dad’s time in office do we
slip below a thousand deaths again.
On 11/24, we pass the 2,000-mark.
On 12/11, we blow past 3,000 dead in a day.
And on 1/6/21 we top 4,000 in a single day.
Or, as Don Jr. might say to the grieving families:
“almost nothing.”
___
10/31/20: The question we must answer
today, and voters must answer on November 3, is, “Is Donald Trump a monster?”
____________________
Trying to “teach an elephant ballet.”
____________________
The short answer is: “No.” Trump may dehumanize his foes. He
has, for example, labeled Sen. Kamala Harris a “monster.”
Saturday, he said again that his political foes were guilty of
“treason.” The penalty for such a crime is death.
But this blogger does not deal in dehumanizing language. He
took an instant dislike to Mr. Trump the day he came down the escalator and
labeled Mexicans, almost without exception, as “rapists” and “murderers.”
So, when the president labels Sen. Harris a “monster,” we have fresh
proof that something is terribly wrong with this man. He’s not a monster. He is
a fundamentally warped human being. He’s warped at his core.
Today, let’s clean up some of the wreckage from the last few
days, and get ready to hunker down and watch as votes are cast and counted. Tens
of millions of Americans have already made their choice, voting early in
person, or filling out a mail-in ballot, signing it, adding proof of identity (like
the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number), sticking a stamp
on the envelope and mailing it.
In other news, after Trump, lambasted CBS’s Leslie Stahl for
conducting an “unfair” 60 Minutes interview, she has received death threats. Stahl is currently shielded by round-the-clock
security.
If the president knows this, he doesn’t care; and if doesn’t
know it, he should, and should care.
*
“All the stars are aligned in the wrong place.”
A NEW “CRITIC” of the president has also emerged, namely Dr.
Anthony Fauci, who deals in scientific truth.
That makes him, ipso facto, a critic of this president. Friday, the
U.S. piled up 99,750 cases of coronavirus.
Saturday, we had another 80,932.
That’s scientists reporting science. You can believe the
experts, whose job it is to tame the spread. Or you can believe the president
who said months ago we were headed for zero cases soon and who insists with the
election looming, that we’ve “turned the corner” and should vote for him.
Dr. Fauci
pulled no punches when he sat down Friday for an interview with the Washington
Post. “We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation. All the
stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season,
with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned
more poorly.”
As for
Trump’s latest favorite doctor, Dr. Scott Atlas, Dr. Fauci was blunt. “I have
real problems with that guy,” he admitted.
“He’s a
smart guy who’s talking about things that I believe he doesn’t have any real
insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that
when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn’t make any sense.”
The Washington Post, doing due diligence, not only
interviews Dr. Fauci, but includes a White House response. Basically: “How dare
Dr. Fauci stab Trump in the back, when it was the doctor who gave the president
such terrible advice?”
Like, when Dr. Fauci said that the average American – in
February – did not need to wear a mask!
The Post, then published a list of 184 times the president downplayed the virus
threat. We can also look at a list compiled by NPR, to
see if there are any of the president’s “greatest hits” the Post might
have missed.
Here’s a quick sampling:
January 22: “We have it totally
under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under
control. It’s going to be just fine.”
February 24: “The
Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to
look very good to me!”
(Note the poor man’s misplaced focus.)
February 26: “When you have 15 people
[with the virus], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to
close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
February 27: “It’s going to disappear.
One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
March 9: “So last year 37,000
Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per
year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on.”
(See: No worse that the flu!)
March 11: For “the vast majority
of Americans, the risk is very, very low.”
March 30: “Stay calm, it will go
away. You know it is going away.”
April 3: Responding to CDC
guidelines urging people to wear masks, Trump says, “You can do it. You don’t
have to do it. I’m choosing not to do it, but some people may want to do
it, and that’s OK. It may be good. Probably will. They’re making a recommendation.
It’s only a recommendation.”
(Dr.
Fauci and just about every other doctor is by this time saying: wear a mask!)
May 14: “If we didn’t do any
testing, we would have very few cases.”
May 19: Referring to the fact
that testing is ramping up: “When we have a lot of cases, I don’t look at that
as a bad thing. I look at that in a certain respect as being a good thing,
because it means our testing is much better. So, if we were testing a million
people instead of 14 million people, we would have far few cases, right?”
(A
few days later, we pass the 100,000-dead mark.)
June 15: “If we stopped testing
right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
(We could stop testing for cancer, then no
one would have cancer.)
June 18: The virus “is dying
out. The numbers are starting to get very good.”
July 6: Why isn’t the Fake News reporting that Deaths are way down? It
is only because they are, indeed, FAKE NEWS!”
July 19: Trump downplays the
danger, as case numbers continue to rise. “Many of those cases are
young people that would heal in a day,” Trump says. “They have the sniffles, and we put it down as a test.” He adds that
many of those sick “are going to get better very quickly.”
July 19: “It’s going to
disappear and I’ll be right.”
August 3 (I added this example myself): Trump says in an interview with Jonathan
Swan that he thinks the coronavirus is under control. Swan seems surprised and
says, people are dying by the thousands every day. “They
are dying. That’s true,” the president responds…It is what it is. But that
doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as
you can control it. This is a horrible plague.”
August 11: “Many people get it and
they have – like kids, they get it, they have the sniffles – young kids,
almost none have a serious problem with it.”
September 4: “And by the way, we’re
rounding the corner. We’re rounding the corner on the virus.”
September 12: “I think the virus,
hopefully, is rounding the turn, rounding the corner. The vaccines are going to
be out soon.”
September 16: “I think by [the
election], covid will be even lower, it’s going to be very low.”
September 21: Hey, this virus isn’t so bad, Trump tells fans
at a rally. “It affects elderly
people, elderly people with heart problems, if they have other problems, that’s
what it really affects, that’s it. In some states thousands of people – nobody
young – below the age of 18, like nobody – they have a strong immune system –
who knows? Take your hat off to the young because they have a hell of an immune
system. It affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing – by the way, open
your schools!”
(The
next day the U.S. hits 200,000 dead.)
October 1: “The end of the
pandemic is in sight.”
October 6: “Flu season is coming
up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine,
die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned
to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most
populations far less lethal!!!”
(Again!
No worse than the flu! For some reason, he increases the number of flu deaths
to 100,000. On March 9, he said 37,000 died from the common flu last year.
Trump not only doesn’t get science he doesn’t get math.)
October
9: “In fact, we’re almost ready
to hit a brand new stock market high in the middle of a pandemic, and I say
rounding the corner of the pandemic.”
(Grandma just died, but the Dow Jones is up!)
October
10: “A lot of flare-ups. But it’s
going to disappear; it is disappearing.”
October 14: “We’re rounding the
turn ... but most people – 99-point-something percent, if you get it, you get better.”
October 16: “The light at the end
of the tunnel is near.”
October 19: “People are tired of covid.
People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.”
(Did “Fauci and all these idiots” make all these idiotic
predictions?)
October 26: “We are absolutely
rounding the corner, other than the fake news wants to scare everybody.”
October 29: “Our vaccine will
eradicate the virus. By the way, we have it, but whether we have it or not,
it’s rounding the turn. It’s rounding the turn.”
(We have a vaccine…whether we have it or not?)
October 30: And finally, we have this,
from a Trump rally in Michigan on Friday. Note the “seriousness” with
which the president takes mask-wearing. He scans the crowd, looking for one of
his favorite Fox News “journalists.”
“I do believe Laura
Ingraham is here someplace,” Trump says. He looks about. “Where is Laura? Where
is she?”
Suddenly, his eagle gaze
falls upon her: “I can’t recognize you. Is that a mask? No way, are you wearing
a mask? I’ve never seen her in a mask. Look at you. Laura, she’s being very
politically correct. Whoa!”
Look, at this point most Americans realize the
president is a numbskull. As someone said, trying to teach Trump about the
coronavirus has been like trying to “teach an elephant ballet.”
*
IF YOU MISSED this story, and you are a Trump fan, you must increase
the number of felons surrounding your Orange God by one.
It turns out that Rudy Giuliani (not yet a felon!) was working
with two alleged felons and one felon who just pled guilty, while gallivanting
around Ukraine, looking for dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden. The two alleged felons,
already indicted, are Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
The felon who copped a plea and agreed to cooperate with investigators was David
Corriea.
And this isn’t “Fake News.” It’s what happened in court. As the Washington Post
explains, Corriea admitted to “defrauding investors in an
insurance start-up that paid Giuliani for consulting work and to lying
to federal regulators investigating suspected campaign finance violations.”
 |
Correia and the president. |
*
DEMOCRATS
in the House of Representatives have also called into question the Trump
administration’s planned $265 million “Defeat Despair” project, designed in
part by Health and Human Services spokesman Michael Caputo. In terms of
felonies, Caputo has none; but he did help set up a meeting with Trump advisor Roger
Stone, a man with seven felonies himself, and a Russian,
during the 2017 campaign.
The HHS plan
was to line up a star-studded celebrity cast to talk about how the coronavirus
wasn’t so bad – and how President Trump was handling it with aplomb – and how,
after we taxpayers paid for the project, we should feel better about the future
and reelect Donald Trump.
Documents
indicate that the thinking behind this mega-MAGA-size waste of money was that “helping
the president will help the country.”
The project
ran into trouble when HHS officials tried to find celebrities who had not been
critical of the President of the United States, and so, could pass the purity
test and help us learn not to despair. Dennis Quaid made the cut. But after
culling through the public records of 274 famous men and women, pickings were slim.
Bryan Cranston, who starred in Breaking Bad,
got nixed because he had “called out Trump’s attacks on journalists” during a 2019
speech. The actor Jack Black never had a chance. A disqualifying notation next
to his name read that Black was “known to be a classic Hollywood liberal.” Also eliminated from
participating in the fight to “Make America Feel Great Again,” were any celebrities,
like the singers Christina Aguilera and Justin
Timberlake, who supported gay rights. So, gay persons could just go ahead and
despair.
Even “better,” when a consulting contract for $15 million was
awarded by HHS, to a company called Atlas Research, that company was informed
it would need to hire three subcontractors. The first turned out to be a “one-person”
company run by a Republican pollster.
The second also appeared to be a “one-person” operation.
Best of all, the third was a “platform owned by Den Tolmor, a Russian-born business
associate of Caputo’s.”
Unfortunately, the “Defeat
Despair” initiative fell apart before all the money could be wasted. Mr. Quaid
dropped out after reports began surfacing about the true intent behind the
project. He admitted in an Instagram post that he was “feeling some outrage and
a lot of disappointment” after having been duped.
Caputo crumbled under the
pressure of trying to defend an idiotic, boondoggle project. First, he posted a
rant on Facebook. He said people were out to get him and the election was going
to be rigged. He suggested Trump fans buy as many guns and as much ammo as possible
– not your typical Health and Human Services message. Then he announced he
would be taking a leave of absence, to fight cancer, and also – one might argue – because he was nuts.
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Caputo. |
*
AS FAR AS DEFEATING DESPAIR
GOES, the expensive HHS initiative has now proven to be a flop.
But maybe if we all wore
masks….
Dr. Fauci said this week that
with cases rising rapidly, it might be time for a national mask mandate.
Maybe someone can get the
message to the president, since we know he hasn’t attended a meeting of his
Coronavirus Task Force in months.
POSTSCRIPT: The president is
spending his last few hours before the election insisting that the pandemic is
over, all thanks to him.
The Centers for Disease control reports that the
crisis is not over. Since we checked last, the U.S. has had:
10/31: 80,932 new cases
11/1: 77,398.
A total of 230,383 Americans have died.
We know that President Trump likes to compare
the current toll to the ordinary flu. Again, let’s check the facts. In
2010-2011, CDC reported 37,000 flu-related deaths, one for every 568
cases.
2011-2012 12,000 dead 1 death per every 750 cases
2012-2013 43,000 1 death per 791
2013-2014 38,000 1 per 789
2014-2015 51,000 1 per 588
2015-2016 23,000 1 per 1,043
2016-2017 38,000 1 per 763
2017-2018 61,000 1 per 738
2018-2019 34,200 1 per 1,038
CDC has also provided an estimate for the toll
from H1N1 pandemic, which struck in 2009. That virus infected
60,800,000 Americans and 12,469 died. That would be a mortality rate of 1 death
for every 4,876 cases.
According to the latest figures the U.S. has
suffered 9,182,628 cases of COVID-19. A total of 230,383 Americans have died.
That works out to 1 death for every 40 known
cases.
BLOGGER’S NOTE
(7/27/22): In going back, and fixing minor errors in my posts, I return to this
list of terrible predictions by President Trump. As of July 26, the last day
reported, the U.S. was still averaging more than three hundred COVID-related
deaths per day. A total of 1,023,382 Americans had died from the disease.
President Biden had been infected, but was recovering. This blogger had been
infected twice, as had his wife. On that date, 37,531 Americans were
hospitalized with the latest variant of the disease.
It never went away
– and may never go away – and it was never “just a flu.”
“That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself
a winner.”
BLOGGER’S NOTE #2
(same date as above): We know that Trump lost the election three days later,
and that going on nineteen months later, he still refuses to admit it – and
hordes of Trump fans refuse to believe it. We know his last two attorney
generals, Bill Barr and Jeffrey Rosen both told him there was no significant
voter fraud in 2020.
We also know, according to Steve Bannon, that
Trump always had a plan for how to handle a defeat that most people knew was
coming. In a
call leaked, finally, in July 2022, Bannon could be heard explaining almost
exactly what was going to happen, regardless of whether Trump won or
lost.
(Below, we provide more of the call
than the Committee aired.)
Ironically, most of
his listeners were Chinese immigrants – at least one of whom recorded what
Bannon was saying. The recording was turned over to reporters for the
left-leaning magazine, Mother
Jones.
Bannon seemed amused as he explained the plan for
Election Night. “What Trump’s gonna do,” he laughed, “is just declare victory.
Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” he
told his listeners. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
“As it sits here today,” Bannon said he expected Trump to
build an early lead, as in-person votes were tallied. Biden’s strength would
come later when mail-in ballots were counted. “And Trump’s going to take
advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” So,
“at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner.
Game over. Suck on that.’”
In fact, Bannon said Trump had a plan, even if he was losing
in the early hours of the night. “If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock,”
Bannon said, “it’s going to be even crazier. No, because he’s gonna sit right
there and say, ‘They stole it. I’m directing the attorney general to shut down
all ballot places in all 50 states,’” he predicted.
“He’s not going out easy. If Biden is winning, Trump is going
to do some crazy shit.”
At no point, of course, did Bannon suggest to his listeners
that the president was actually going to win.
He simply said that Trump was going to claim he did – and
that that was the real victory plan.
“So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a
firestorm,” Bannon continued. “You’re going to have antifa, crazy. The media,
crazy. The courts are crazy. And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking,
tweeting shit out: ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.’”
___
November 1, 2020: With only two days left until
Election Day, the blogger must admit he has been poring over polling data for
weeks. As a result, he’s drinking more and still not sure what to expect.
____________________
Trump
won’t win the popular vote.
____________________
I have argued repeatedly that the polls, in
aggregate, have rarely been wrong. Whenever I point this out, Trump fans
respond with fury, and insist, because I believe in evidence, that I must be a
commie.
So, let me start with one surefire prediction
and offer a bet I’d be happy to take from any unwitting Trump fan. The Orange God
can’t win the popular vote unless Joe Biden commits a “gaffe,” such as
admitting that he really is a satanic pedophile, as the poor souls who follow
“Q” insist.
As I mentioned recently, members of the Trump cult will believe virtually anything at this point.
(See: 10/29/20.)
*
PUTTING FAITH in old-fashioned arithmetic,
rather than conspiracy theories involving liberals who cannibalize babies,
let’s turn to history for guidance. I was unable to find RealClear Politics
(RCP) averages from 2000, except in a single line, on a 2004 chart. But that
website, which combines all kinds of polls, had George W. Bush favored, barely, to win the presidency, two
decades ago.
Four years later, the final polling averages at RCP
had President Bush leading Sen. John Kerry.
In 2008, averages showed Mr. Obama with a comfortable lead. When he stood for a second term in 2012, the
race was expected to be close, with the incumbent winning a second term.
“It
took guts for Director Comey to make the move.”
In 2016 most experts thought Mrs. Clinton would
win. We need to remember, however, how close the final polls were.
We also need to remember that ten days before the election, F.B.I. Director
James Comey revealed that Hillary was still the subject of an investigation
regarding her use of a private email server and thousands of missing emails.
Trump spent those last ten days battering the
front runner, saying, “it took guts for
Director Comey to make the move that he made in light of the kind of opposition
he had where they’re trying to protect her from criminal prosecution. You know
that. It took a lot of guts.”
He said he hoped Comey would “hang tough.”
“A lot of people want him to do the wrong thing,” Trump suggested. “What
he did was the right thing.”
Later, Trump would insist that Comey had been working
to blow up his campaign from the very start.
(Did
I mention: Trump supporters will believe anything?)
*
AS FOR ME, I am a fan of verifiable facts. For
example, was the Russian investigation a “witch hunt?”
Opinion.
Did all the members of Team Trump listed below eventually admit
meeting with Russians during the 2016 campaign? They did.
Fact:
Michael Cohen
Gen. Michael T.
Flynn
Rick Gates
Jared Kushner
Paul Manafort
George Nader
Carter Page
W. Samuel Patten
George Papadopoulos
Felix Sater
Roger Stone
Donald Trump Jr.
Alexander van der
Zwaan
(Names
in bold indicate persons convicted of at least one felony.)
We should also add the name of one man who
helped Stone arrange to meet with a Russian, and then lied to Congress and said
he didn’t:
Michael Caputo
Caputo avoided a felony charge at the last
minute, by amending his testimony to Congress and claiming he forgot about
helping Stone. (See: 10/31/20 for an update on his recent activities.)
*
AS I WAS SAYING, I’m a believer in facts. For
that reason, I checked the polls as far back as the 2000 election. Here’s what
I found. In the first column below we see who had the lead in the final average
of polls. The second column is the actual margin of victory. The third shows the
difference between prediction and the actual vote.
Final
Presidential Polling Averages (2000-2020)
Lead
in the final polls Real margin Difference
Bush +0.6 0.5 1.1**
Bush +1.5 2.4 0.9
Obama +7.3 7.6 0.3
Obama +0.7 3.9 3.2
Clinton +3.2 2.1 1.1
Biden (with
one day left): +6.7.
In the five presidential contests, previous to
2020, the national polling averages have never been off by more than 3.2
points.
*
STILL HAUNTED by the ghosts of 2016, I checked
to see how accurate midterm election polling has been. RCP reports on
what is called the “generic ballot.” That is, which party do voters prefer to
control the next Congress?
Midterm
Election Polls
Average lead Final result Difference
2002 Republicans +1.7 +4.6 +2.9
2006 Democrats
+11.5 +7.9 –3.6
2010 Republicans +9.4 +6.8 –2.6
2014 Republicans +2.4 +5.7 +3.3
2018 Democrats +7.3 +8.4 +1.1
2020 Democrats +6.8
In the last five midterms, the party leading in
polling on the generic ballot went on to pile up more votes when people cast actual
ballots. Again, the biggest margin of error was 3.6 points.
(We might note that in 2018, President Trump insisted a “red wave” was coming. When the waters receded, Democrats
had outpolled Republicans by 8.8 million votes, largest midterm margin
ever recorded.)
___
11/2/20: Sunday we
explained why it will be impossible for Trump to win the popular vote, barring a
miracle.
For instance: This blogger may be
underestimating the strength of the “Neo-Nazi’s for Trump” movement.
____________________
“Three more
years! Three more years!”
____________________
It would also appear that a huge turnout is
coming, and pollsters may be in uncharted territory.
If nothing else, let’s give it up for the
Nineteenth Amendment! That amendment granted women suffrage. We know that if
Mr. Biden wins, it’s going to be because of women. I have always been
fond of the women demographic, and would never grab any of them you know where,
because I am not a classless jerk. Female Americans are going to go big for Joe
Biden tomorrow.
In an average of 21 polls since the start of
September, women prefer the Democrat over President Pussy Grabber by an average of
18.7 points.
Voter turnout among young people could also be
huge, since, to cite one example, most young Americans believe climate change
is real and a grave threat. If a blue wave is coming, it’s not going to be led
by folks with walkers. Americans, age 18-29, voted at a rate of 36% in the 2018 midterms, almost double the rate
from 2014. A Pew Research study puts the turnout figure in 2018 even higher, 42%,
or 26 million millennials. At that point, this youthful cohort made up one-fifth
of the vote. “By making our voices heard,”
one told a reporter last week, “it will send a message to those in power: We’re
not going anywhere, and we’ll continue raising hell.”
If you’re a Republican you have to sweat, because 63% of voters under 30 say they plan to vote this time
around, vs. 47% during the last presidential election. According to a study by
Harvard University, those young voters will break 63% to 25%, for Biden. A
second study predicted a more modest 59% to 37% split. Still, the more the young
show up, the worse it is for Trump.
Even worse, if you hope to enjoy “three more
years” of President Trump (the man has spent more than a year of his first term,
409 days, at his private
golf clubs and resorts), older voters have turned. In the past four
presidential elections, voters over age 65 have gone for Republicans by an
average of ten points. Trump won the nursing home demographic by seven his
first time around.
This year, his plan appears to be to kill us all
off, since he scoffs at the idea that anyone dies from the coronavirus except
older folks. In early September a Monmouth University poll showed Americans age
65 and up, preferred Biden by eleven points, 54% to 43% for Trump. A CNN
poll at the start of October, and another from NBC News and the Wall Street
Journal, both showed Mr. Biden’s lead among senior citizens had grown to
more than 20 points.
Where, exactly, is the incumbent faring best?
Mr. Trump still has the support of 78% of white evangelicals, vs. 17% for
Biden. On October 13, he had an eight-point lead among white Catholics, but
trailed among Hispanic Catholics by 41 points. Trump enjoys a fat and happy lead
among white voters who failed to finish high school, and a solid lead among
whites who graduated from high school. The same poll shows Biden leading among college graduates by 20 points, and among voters
who have completed postgraduate work by 68% to 28%.
Again, all
the Trump supporters this blogger knows personally are good people. One of my former
best friends is against abortion, and votes almost entirely in accord with his profoundly
held belief. We’re not talking these days; but I know no better man.
Still, I’m sad to report, Trump has a 100% to 0%
lead among the neo-Nazi crew. Richard Spencer and that warped bunch have been
cheering Trump since before the votes were counted in 2016.
Because they understand their man.
FUN FACT: Four former communications directors
for the Republican National Committee explain that they have cast early ballots
for…
Joe Biden!
One, Ryan Mahoney, even posts this picture on Twitter:
Trevor Francis and Lisa
Miller join Mahoney in casting ballots for Biden. Doug Heye writes in the name of Sen. Mitt Romney.
The National Committee
of Asian American Republicans also announces it will support the challenger.
The group explains:
We don’t need a smart-pants president
who knows everything including the best medicine curing COVID-19, who empowers
only his base to run over political opposition. We need a president with
empathy, integrity, and broadness capable of bringing all sides to the table to
find common ground, and work together overcoming serious challenges ahead.
Even leading disease experts on the White House Coronavirus Task
Force appear to be turning on the boss. Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator warns
in an email obtained by the Washington Post, that the country is
“entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of the pandemic.” Whereas
Trump has said repeatedly that the country is “rounding the corner.” Birx, by
contrast, calls for “much more aggressive action” to battle the spread.
Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned that the United States is
“in for a whole lot of hurt” going into fall and winter.
This has prompted Dimwit Donald to suggest that he might fire Fauci.
At a recent campaign rally, the president responded to a chant, “Fire Fauci!”
in typical cowardly fashion. He didn’t say he’d fire him before voting begins,
because most Americans trust the doctor way more than the president.
So Dimwit Don simply grinned, and responded, “Don't tell
anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election.”
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